A Note to this WWW edition

Ruskin was originally published in 1985 by Oxford University Press in its Past Masters series and later adapted for the Victorian Web in May and June 2000 as a project supported by the University Scholars Programme of the National University of Singapore. It was carried out by the following Student Research Assistants under the direction of the author: Gerald Ajam of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences created the electronic text using OmniPage Pro OCR software; I created the HTML version for the first chapter, and Tiaw Kay Siang of the Faculty of Engineering created the HTML version of the remainder of the volume. The original volume has no foot- or endnotes. I added all links to materials in VW.

In December 2006 I translated it into CSS, basing the design on that created by Glenn Burris of the Johns Hopkins Press for my Hypertext (1992), Hypertext 2.0 (1997), and Hypertext 3.0 (2006) [GPL].

John Ruskin was born on 8 February 1819 at 54 Hunter Street, London, the only child of Margaret and John James Ruskin. His father, a prosperous, self-made man who was a founding partner of Pedro Domecq sherries, collected art and encouraged his son's literary activities, while his mother, a devout evangelical Protestant, early dedicated her son to the service of God and devoutly wished him to become an Anglican bishop. Ruskin, who received his education at home until the age of twelve, rarely associated with other children and had few toys. During his sixth year he accompanied his parents on the first of many annual tours of the Continent. Encouraged by his father, he published his first poem, "On Skiddaw and Derwent Water," at the age of eleven, and four years later his first prose work, an article on the waters of the Rhine.

Ruskin's own watercolor of Christ Church, Oxford. Click on image for larger picture and other information.

In 1836, the year he matriculated as a gentleman-commoner at Christ Church,
Oxford, he wrote a pamphlet defending the painter Turner
against the periodical critics, but at the artist's request he did not publish
it. While at Oxford (where his mother had accompanied him) Ruskin associated
largely with a wealthy and often rowdy set but continued to publish poetry and
criticism; and in 1839 he won the Oxford Newdigate Prize for poetry. The next
year, however, suspected consumption led him to interrupt his studies and travel,
and he did not receive his degree until 1842, when he abandoned the idea of
entering the ministry. This same year he began the first volume of Modern
Painters after reviewers of the annual Royal Academy exhibition had again
savagely treated Turner's works, and in 1846, after making his first trip abroad
without his parents, he published the second volume, which discussed his theories
of beauty and imagination within the context of figural as well as landscape
painting. [1/2]

On 10 April 1848 Ruskin married Euphemia Chalmers Gray, and the next year he
published The Seven Lamps of Architecture, after which he and Effie set
out for Venice. In 1850 he published The King of the Golden River, which
he had written for Effie nine years before, and a volume of poetry, and in the
following year, during which Turner died and Ruskin made the acquaintance of
the Pre-Raphaelites, the
first volume of The Stones of Venice. The final two volumes appeared
in 1853, the summer of which saw Millais, Ruskin, and Effie together in Scotland,
where the artist painted Ruskin's portrait. The next year his wife left him
and had their marriage annulled on grounds of non-consummation, after which
she later married Millais. During this difficult year, Ruskin defended the Pre-Raphaelites,
became close to Rossetti, and taught at the Working Men's College.

In 1855 Ruskin began Academy Notes, his reviews of the annual exhibition, and the following year, in the course of which he became acquainted with the man who later became his close friend, the American Charles Eliot Norton, he published the third and fourth volumes of Modern Painters and The Harbours of England. He continued his immense productivity during the next four years, producing The Elements of Drawing and The Political Economy of Art in 1857, The Elements of Perspective and The Two Paths in 1859, and the fifth volume of Modern Painters and the periodical version of Unto This Last in 1860. During 1858, in the midst of this productive period, Ruskin decisively abandoned the evangelical Protestantism which had so shaped his ideas and attitudes, and he also met Rose La Touche, a young Irish Protestant girl with whom he was later to fall deeply and tragically in love.

Ruskin and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Throughout the 1860s Ruskin continued writing and lecturing on social and political economy, art, and myth, and during this decade he produced the Fraser's Magazine "Essays on Political Economy" (1863); revised as Munera Pulveris, 1872), Sesame and Lilies (1865), The Grown of Wild Olive
(1866), The Ethics of the Dust (1866), Time and Tide, and [2/3] The
Queen of the Air (1869), his study of Greek myth. The next decade, which begins with his delivery of the inaugural lecture at Oxford as Slade Professor of Fine Art in February 1870, saw the beginning of Fors Clavigera, a series of letters to the working men of England, and various works on art and popularized science. His father had died in 1864 and his mother in 1871 at the age of ninety.

Left: Ruskin's grave, Coniston churchyard; right: Lake Coniston.

In 1875 Rose la Touche died insane, and three years later Ruskin suffered his first attack of mental illness and was unable to testify during the Whistler trial when the artist sued him for libel. In 1880 Ruskin resigned his Oxford Professorship, suffering further attacks of madness in 1881 and 1882; but after his recovery he was re-elected to the Slade Professorship in 1883 and delivered the lectures later published as The Art of England (1884). In 1885 he began Praeterita, his autobiography, which appeared intermittently in parts until 1889, but he became increasingly ill, and Joanna Severn, his cousin and heir, had to bring him home from an 1888 trip to the Continent. He died on 20 January 1900 at Brantwood, his home near Coniston Water.